Amid the current crisis in the humanities and the human sciences,
researchers should take up the challenge of writing more effectively. Rather
than clinging to forms inherited from the nineteenth century, they should
invent new ways to captivate readers, while also providing better demonstrations
of their research. Defining problems, drawing on a multitude of sources,
carrying out investigations, taking journeys in time and space: these methods
of inquiry are as much literary opportunities as cognitive tools. They invite
experimentation in writing across disciplines, trying out different lines of reasoning,
shuttling back and forth between past and present, describing the
process of discovery, and using the narrative “I.” We can address the public
creatively, decompartmentalize disciplines, and encourage encounters between
history and literature, sociology and cinema, anthropology and graphic
novels—all without compromising intellectual rigor. Now more than ever,
the human sciences need to assert their place in the polis.